Archive for May, 2008

i’ve just done a quick experiment looking at the constituent elements of an image. For the sake of Jonathan’s blogging research I’m leaving the writing at that. I’ll reserve the right to write more in a separate post if I feel like it.

Two ravens sit on Odin’s shoulders, and into his shoulders tell all the news they see or hear. their names are Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory). At sunrise he sends them off to fly throughout the whole world, and they return in time for the first meal. Thus he gathers knowledge about many things that are happening, and so people call him the raven god. As is said:

Hugin and Munin
fly each day
over the wide world.
I fear for Hugin
that he may not return,
though I worry more for Munin.

Hugin and Munin are Odin’s (The All-Father) route to seeing all of creation. They carry all. They’re probably the single most relevant part of the Prose Edda to my project.

So I said I’d write a separate post about the Prose Edda, concerning its ambiguities and its interesting journey from myths and stories told by Norse poets to its status as an important document of northern European history.

The first thing that really grabbed me about the Prose Edda was the ambiguity of it. It was written by an Icelandic chieftain, Snorri Sturluson, who seems to have been a pretty Machiavellian guy. His life was defined by his desire to be the most powerful man in Iceland. To this end, he got cosy with King Hakon of Norway. Some scholars have suggested that this was in order to bring Iceland under Norwegian rule. His failure in this was eventually the death of him. He was murdered by his son-in-law at the order of King Hakon.

I recently finished reading the Prose Edda which is one of the major sources of information about Norse mythology. All has its roots in Germanic/Danish languages. I thought Norse myth would be a useful insight in to the way the Vikings saw the world and ‘all’. Indeed it was. Below is an excerpt from the Penguin edition, concerning itself largely with the ‘Yggdrasil’, or, the ‘World Tree’.

In describing different places in the cosmos, the Edda often employs the imprecise word heimr, meaning ‘home’, ‘world’ or ‘land’, and we must guess at the locations of many of the described areas. In addition to the realms of the gods, men and giants, the Edda speaks of geographically disparate regions such as Ginnungagap in the north, an empty place filled with ice, and Muspell, a burning place of intense heat to the south. So also there are several heavens; one is called Andlang and another, ‘further up’ is where light elves live.

Okay, I’ve not blogged for ages but I’ve got tons to blog about. I’m going to put it all in separate smaller blog posts, as I’ve got quite a few things to put up here which are all quite different. First off, then, I just did this mini experiment. I was wondering what would happen if I played with a simple sentence with an open ended meaning. It’s a bit rough round the edges and I’m inclined to get rid of the blur (particularly in this animated gif mode) but the basics are there. I’m still not sure what it means but it sums up a few things I’ve been thinking with this project so far. The whole thing is impossible to grasp, staying just out of reach. I think this crucial.